


The Vatican Treaty

by titangelion (DrerAhv)



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-07-27 05:25:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7605259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrerAhv/pseuds/titangelion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Armin, a young transfer student to an international secondary school in Rome, is taken during an angel lockdown for questioning about a missing classmate. Once there, however, he realizes answering their questions is the least of his troubles. Canon divergent, has new worldbuilding to accommodate the fusion of both Eva+AoT settings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Vatican Treaty

**Author's Note:**

>   
>    
> 
> 
> Shout-out to my beta readers erenout, iceemoon, and kyobreck!  
> I started work on this story during nanowrimo in 2013, after coming up with the AU itself with ladytano. At first, I just intended for it to be a fun little way to prove to myself I _could_ complete nanowrimo as I rediscovered myself through antidepressants. _After_ nanowrimo, I told myself I just intended for it to be a way to while away the hours during my remarkably uneventful senior year. As you can see, three years later, it ended up growing into something much bigger.  
>  Whenever I got to feeling like shit, I worked on various parts of this story. It’s been a fantastic distraction for me in down moments of my life, and granted me a sense of accomplishment on days where I otherwise felt directionless. Now, after almost three years of obsessing, writing, rewriting, and re-rewriting, I think it’s time for me to turn in what I have. I hope you enjoy this retelling as much as I enjoyed working on it.  
> Since this is three years old, it’s going to be a little divergent from Attack on Titan’s plot in some areas. Some things I couldn’t - or was unwilling to - rework into the crossover. With that being said, I’ve tried to keep as many parallels in place as possible.  
> Also: Don’t worry about character deaths. Everyone lives in the end, as long as they have a will to. You’ll get to see all of them. 

The angel sirens melted from his ears as Armin woke to voices.

His eyes popped open, exasperated. The lockdown shelter’s door was ajar now, a sliver of light cutting over his sleeping bag.

“Can’t we just check again?” A man’s voice - the RA for his dorm, he knew, the one that helped them all evacuate down here in the first place.

A woman’s voice. “ _No_ , we _can’t_ , so just-”

The boy beside him groaned and pulled the corner of his sleeping bag over his head.

“It’s fine, I’ll do it,” Armin muttered, shimmying out of his sleeping bag. He leaned forward to push the door shut.

A man’s hand reached through and clamped onto his wrist. He yelped.

The man opened the door a little wider, to the groans of the other classmates. He glowered down at Armin. “You speak English?”

“Y - yes?”

The RA’s voice came from behind the door, irritated. “I told you they all speak it.”

“Come in here.”

Armin slowly got to his feet and ducked under the man’s arm as he held it open. He smelled heavily of nicotine. He closed the door behind him.

It was crowded in the little stairwell. The RA was here, yes, a tired-looking man with frizzy dark hair, wearing the odd combination of pyjamas and running shoes, along with the man that had grabbed him and a woman he had never seen before. They were wearing matching uniforms - a beige suit with orange shoulder patches.

“How old are you?” the man barked.

“They’re all -”

“Thir - thirteen?” Armin stuttered.

The RA gave the man a knowing look, as if they already had this conversation.

"We'll take this one," the woman said. She was young, and a strawberry blonde, with her hair cut in a bob that just barely brushed the shoulders of her suit.

"What's going on?" Armin asked, suddenly feeling much more awake.

The man and woman exchanged glances. The RA spoke up. "They just need to borrow you for some questions about - about a missing girl. They’re investigators.”

“Someone’s missing?” Armin asked. That would explain why they had gone around shining lights into everyone’s faces an hour ago, then…

“It’s just some questions.” the woman cut in. “We’ll just need to take you down to the station for it.”

“Alright.” he said. “But I probably don’t know much about this…”

“Oh, that’s fine.” she said, boot already on the first step of the stairs. "Let's go, then!"

He was grabbed by the shoulder and they marched up all three flights of stairs. By the time he had finally reached the final step he leaned against the wall, feeling a little fuzzy-headed, tried to catch his breath and -

"Comon! Comon!" the man barked. He yanked him away through the steel door and into - daylight.

They hurried out into an empty alleyway. Though he knew he had been here not even five hours before, as he and his dormmates had shuffled in bare feet and slippers with the RA hurrying them out of earshot from the blaring angel sirens, it looked alien and new in the daylight. Grafitti was scrawled across the walls, there was broken glass on the ground…and in the street, a waiting police van, which would have said Polizia if not for the open van door, where it was reduced to simply Lizi-A. So they really were police officers…

“Just get in the back there,” said the woman, running ahead of him to the other side. The man shoved him towards the seat. Armin climbed up into the seat and the man slammed the door shut behind him. There was a metal grate separating him from the front seats. The woman turned the key in the ignition and the engine roared to life.

“You buckled?”

“Ye -”

His response was sucked from him as he was slammed into the back of his seat.

The van peeled away from the sidewalk and barrelled down the middle of the road, narrowly missing all of the cars that were piled up on the sides in the mid-evacuation panic. The streets whipped by in a blur - they swung around street after street, Armin getting thrown against the door and into the armrest.

Buildings whipped by and they swung into sideroads. An emergency highway - one of the ones that led to the underground city - swung into view, the tollbooth right in their path. She was shouting something into the radio, though he couldn’t make it out above the din of the engine and the road. As they barrelled down towards it, the booth’s bar slowly rose, and - there was a loud ker-THUNK as they just clipped the bottom edge of it and flew on by.

“WHERE ARE WE GOING?” he screamed. There were no other cars here - which was exactly why they were created, he knew, so that personnel could get from the surface into the underground quicker by escaping the snarls of city traffic - and the engine kept going louder and louder as the road slowly rose above the city, the rooves and domes of buildings and tops of trees whipping below the sides of the road. He could see the other half of Rome, far across the Tiber’s bay - or rather, the massive, metal walls of it, long since having been raised that night as the angel sirens had gone off.

The road far ahead disappeared into a narrow tower, black and glossy with solar panels. The tower was by the bus stop, he knew - on the ground, far below, the foot of the tower was covered billboards and graffiti, and weeks ago he had stared up at the highway above the street and wondered if it would ever see any use. And now they were on it and the tower was coming closer - larger -

Armin’s head slammed into the front seat as the brakes screamed out and the car skidded into the dark of the tower.

He struggled to catch his breath, his stomach still painfully lurching. The inside of the tower was actually fairly small - just large enough for one car, and no more than that, with cement bumpers on every side.

She rolled down her window and leaned out to reach something, cursing a little, and then quickly undoing her belt buckle before leaning halfway out the door. There was a ear-splitting BZZT, like a warning alarm.

“There, I hit it.”

Armin yelped as the car jolted...and then they began to descend, the overcast light spilling in from the opening quickly giving way to the dim, orange florescent lights that lined the elevator shaft. It clanked and groaned precariously as the car swayed back and forth.

There was a quiet click and the unmistakable and overpowering smell of nicotine filled the car.  The man in front of him rolled the front window down and the machinery - the grinds and echoing moans of the car elevator - became even louder. “You calling it in?” he asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it.”

He watched the man's arm extend out the open window, dangling the cigarette between his fingers precariously. Hot, stagnant air rolled into the car.

“Where - are we - _going_?” Armin’s voice was shaky.

“Underground, obviously.” The man did not even turn his head to address him.

Armin stared dumbfounded. Something in him was beginning to panic - the local police shouldn’t have anything to do with the people who use the underground. It was totally bought out by NERV, and they only ever used it for anti-angel weaponry. Civilians weren’t even allowed down there anymore…

The elevator groaned to a halt and began to move sideways, downward. A long, long diagonal tunnel that went as far down as he could see presented itself. For the first time, he realized his own door had no inside latch.

The radio crackled in the front. “ _Ral, what’s your status? Did you find her?_ ”

The woman - Ral - glanced at the man next to her, and then back through the grate to Armin. “We’ll have to wing this one. We did find a - an interviewee.”

There was a long pause.

“ _They’re in the car with you?_ ” came the radio, finally.

“Yes.”

“ _Make sure you don’t lose them.”_

The radio gave one last pop and the car fell silent. Ral took a long, shuddering sigh, and leaned back in her seat. The man - Armin thought it was the man, anyways - clacked his tongue and started digging around in the console.

Armin spoke up. “Is the police station underground?”

They ignored him.

“Do they have anything?” Ral asked, looking at the man shuffling around.

“All they’ve got in this fucking thing is the Bee Gees,” he pulled out a cassette tape, though it was too dark for Armin to read the cover.

“Put it on, then.” she groaned. “Uhg, you’re spilling cigarette ash everywhere.”

It only took a few seconds before soft piano notes began to fill the car. There was a quiet exchange of cigarettes in the front seat and Ral’s face was briefly illuminated by a lighter. The song was beginning to wail out into a ballad.

Ral spoke up. “How’s about you, Armin. You know Ymir?”

Armin felt like he was just about choking on all the smoke. “No - I don’t - think so…”

“Oh please,” the man interjected. “Of course you have, she isn’t shy. Has a bit of a punk look going, brown hair, doesn’t shower as much as -”

“I’ve mostly been in my room, so I wouldn’t know.”

“You’re not from Italy, right?” The man suddenly got serious.

“No.” Armin was taken aback. “I -”

“No offense, but what’s the point of going to an international school here if you’re just going to stay in your room?”

Ral shot the man a look. She turned the music up a little louder, and for the rest of their descent the only sound were the groans of the elevator and the laments of the singer’s lovesong. The car rocked gently back and forth on the platform with the fluorescent lights sliding through the car as they descended.

Soon enough the orange incandescence was washed out by sunlight leaking into the tunnel, and Ral sat up a little straighter and shifted gears. The elevator jerked to a stop and they drove out into sunlight…in a wooded area.

 _This was underground?_ he thought. He had seen pictures in magazines from way back before the underground had become off-limits and when it had just meant to be its own city, the replica buildings still covered in scaffolding and hard-hatted workers. There had been one particular picture of them chipping away at the edges of the cave with explosives, rock shrapnel and clouds of dust frozen midair in the photo, and in small text at the bottom; _Like many in light of the threat of thermonuclear war, Rome has set its sights on underground living_.

What _seemed_ like sunlight raced through the car windows in shining patches as they bounced over unfinished road. Dust and dirt kicked up in a cloud around them.

“Cage seventeen, right?”

“Yeah.” She turned up a steep dirt road (surrounded by little orange caution cones - were they repaving?) and the man rolled down the window and threw his cigarette out, cursing a bit as dust billowed into the car.

They came to a clearing in the woods as the car began to bump over gravel. There was a small, boxy white building that was dwarfed by the surrounding trees. Despite how cramped the building looked, dozens of cars were parked around it. A tall, intimidatingly-built blonde man in a navy blue uniform held the door open with one hand.

They pulled up right in front and killed the engine. The blonde man rushed over and slid Armin’s door aside. Armin hopped down and winced slightly as his feet hit the gravel.

“Erwin -” Ral began.

“It’s fine. We’ll work with it.” He put his hand on Armin’s shoulder and ushered them inside.

The inside was cold - the most brutal air conditioning he had ever felt. Before his eyes could even adjust to the indoor lighting, they were already dragging him to an elevator.

“How much time?”

“Not much,” said Erwin. “We’re down to three drones. It’s good you got here when you did, I was beginning to worry we’d have to put a coma patient in the unit…-” Armin was pushed inside and everyone piled in.

The tall man quickly pressed his wallet against a black box by the door - a small green light lit up and beeped and he dialed 10B - the elevator went all the way down to a 10th basement! - and leaned against the door.

“About the interview -” His voice quavered - he felt like he already knew the answer.

“Interview?” It was like Erwin noticed Armin for the first time. “Well, I suppose you’ll see why you’re here soon enough.”

The elevator dinged and everyone seemed to tense up. The door opened.

They stepped out into a short hallway without any doors, where everything, everything, from the metal walls to the concrete floor, was painted a sickening shade of seafoam green, with the exception of a thick red stripe that ran the length of the walls. _B10_ was written in massive, blocky letters on the end of the hallway. _CAGE 17_.

The man grabbed him by the arm firmly and he was half-dragged to the dead end, a feeling of _something isn't quite right, something isn't quite right_ , settling all too easily into his stomach. And just like that, before they even reached it, the wall at the end of the hallway began to retract, a sliver of brightness widening…deafeningly loud echoes and hollers reverberated all along the hallway from beyond, and they pulled him through the threshold.

The chamber was horribly bright and shouts were coming from all directions. Water was echoing all around. A massive....

His thoughts raced.

A massive _armored_ _head_ towered above everything. Its chin - protruding and angular - was just level with the cement floor they were standing on, black armor shining in the harsh light. The man in a red jacket standing next to it seemed positively miniscule compared to it.

He heard his own voice. "Is that an Eva?"

Armin’s head felt like it was buzzing - there was no way this was in front of him, that this was real. Images of the news reports flashed through his head, a fight he had seen over morning cereal, Evangelions against a massive, cowl-wearing monster as his dormmates bickered about sight-seeing on the couch...

The voices around him grew thin and distant...the Eva was so massive it didn’t leave room for hearing them. It was foreign - one he had never seen before on the news, lacking horns or ornamentation, with dark, dark slits in the armor for eyes, and a midnight blue plate over the face. His eyes slid to the enormous, narrow white cylinder sticking out the back of the thing’s neck. Something smelled slightly of blood…

“Come on Armin, we’ll guide you through piloting it...-”

His pulse filled his ears as his vision began to tunnel away from him. _This isn’t happening,_ he thought, _this isn’t real_ … his legs became weak...

Voices came from far away;

“ _Oh, shit -_ ”

“ _All we need is a stable AT field! Get him in there!”_

...His ears were still ringing as he was hoisted up from the floor roughly and thrown over a shoulder, voices ringing from all around him...He tried to beat his fists into the back of the person carrying him, tried to kick his feet into their belly, but his limbs were distant. He watched his fists clutch weakly, ineffectively, over and over again at the man’s red coat. He started to hiccup.

“Go back to Central Dogma and get ready! - We only have to buy one hour -”

Hydraulics hissed from somewhere behind him and everything reverberated slightly as if out of a tin can - right as he tried to turn his head he was thrown onto the seat inside the chamber and bashed his forehead against the side of the hatch.

“He’ll be fine! GO!”

And just like that, the hatch began to slide shut behind him. A hysterical noise came from his throat - “No! _No!_ _NO_!” The weakness from his faint was still heavy in him, and before he could even turn, the chamber slid into darkness and their voices were sealed away. The hatch had sealed, and he was left in suffocating, echoic darkness.

Dim lights flickered on from far below the seat, at the end of the chamber and the chair jolted enough to throw him off balance and bite his tongue. He clung to the side of the chair as it slowly slid down, down, down, closer to the bottom of the tank, panic welling in his throat as he watched the hatch get further and further away -

"Please - please - please -"

The chair locked in place. The lights at the bottom were close enough that he could touch them, if only he stretched his arm….

" _Can you hear this?_ " The voice reverberated around the chamber, a slight radio crackle in the background.

" _He can, the echo's there._ " added another.

" _Deploying LCL_."

The heavy stench of blood returned and quickly became overwhelming. Orange liquid gurgled and bubbled up from below the bottom of the seat. An odd hysterical noise came from the back of his throat and he stood up in his chair -

“Please - _please_ \- I want to go _home_ \- I _CAN’T_ \- _PLEASE_ -”

“ _It will be fine, we’ll walk you through it. Just take a deep breath_.”

The smell was strong and he wanted to vomit - the liquid overtook the edge of the seat, and then his knees, turning his monkey pyjamas dark and then up to his hips and the small of his back - he rose his arms to keep them out but it quickly went to his chest then his chin then past his mouth - he squeezed his eyes shut, head feeling thick and tears burning at his eyes, and a shuddering gasp escaped -

" _Breathe. It will only burn for a second._ "

It rushed readily down his throat and into his lungs, tasting exactly of old copper and iron, and there was a deep, agonizing ache inside his lungs. He gasped and swallowed for air but found none of it.

" _Ionizing LCL..._ "

Slowly, the pain turned to a dull throb. He felt light-headed.

" _Starting synchronization ...Synchronization rate at 22% ... Starting visuals..._ "

The chamber and liquid around him flashed through a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes before the Cage - that awful, white and minimalistic cathedral-sized room - swam into view... The pool below the Eva looked empty now - the bottom, the feet, were horribly, dizzyingly distant…

Machinery rumbled far, distantly below and the room began to slide from him - he (the unit?) began to slide backwards and upwards...lights began to come down from above, and he looked up to see a massive tunnel going straight up, hatches unlocking one after the other until he could see bright, hazy light far above...

“ _Stop blubbering for five seconds and listen to what we’re telling you. To walk, you use the sticks on either…_ ”

Things were creaking all around him, and there was a distinct, throbbing hum that seemed to come from the walls themselves. His chair - and the sticks, one to either side of him, like joysticks or handles - seemed to be floating without anchor in the room.

“ _LAUNCH!_ ”

He was thrown violently back into his seat and cried out. He dug his fingers into the sides of the chair, squeezing his eyes shut as the strips of lights in the tunnel rapidly strobed past - before it just as violently stopped and he was thrown again.

He opened his eyes. The sunlight was striking harshly off the pavement - he was on a long, unfamiliar street, lined with glassy highrises. He was eye-level with the highest floor, though he couldn’t see himself...from the glass, the Eva’s eyesocket, now glowing white, stared back into him. The dark armor gleamed like a beetle in the sun…

Gunfire echoed, followed by a deafening CRACK!

He heard the high whining of the motors before he saw the pair of drones tear around the corner of a distant highrise. They raced towards his head like furious wasps, then just as quickly - BZZT! they shot past his shoulders and the noise faded.

The world fell quiet again.

It was then he saw the angel.

“ _... moving the joysticks to ..._ ”

Its reflection slid slowly across the sides of buildings down the street; it was not in a hurry. All the thoughts ran from his mind. It swam through the air lazily, red chitin shining dully in the overcast day, glowing tendrils trailing elegantly beside it. His breath caught in his throat, the reflection getting closer, closer - its head, massive, something like the horseshoe crabs he had seen pictures of in atlases of species long since dead, appeared at the corner….

“ARMIN, _MOVE…-_ ”

Blood pounded in his skull and his ears and his throat. Slowly, the angel’s head came fully into view (it had large, purple eyespots), and then the thorax, long and thin, with skeletal limbs that twitched and writhed over a glowing, massive red sphere...

Gunfire split his hearing.

CRACK! A flash of light shot out to his left - something struck his shoulder and he was thrown back, smacked the back of his head against his chair as the Eva fell - before he even hit the ground, gunfire again - and _a blinding pain shot through his abdomen_ and he _screamed_.

The angel hoisted the Eva up on a glowing, burning tendril, and as it did so the pain was _in him too_ , he was gasping for breath, he was on fire -

\- and then it flung him and everything whipped into a blur, a high feeling in his gut. He - the eva - crashed into something, windows shattering and concrete crumbling. The air was thrust out of him as he was thrown around the cabin.

The cabin had gone dark. There was a small _ping!_ and a large, glowing red timer erupted from the darkness. 00:59:45.

“ _Are you alright?_ ”

The world was high and thin with pain; he could not quite squeak out a yes or a no. Slowly, light began to filter back into the cabin. He was surrounded by rubble - his legs were crushed under the ruins of buildings. And - faintly - he saw a hint far away of a glowing tendril and silhouette….

He froze in place in his seat. It drew closer, hovering upright now, a surreal sight - bent at the head at a 90 degree angle from the sheer weight, the body too thin to support it. He could see its heart now, the red sphere pulsing gently with light, exposed in the center of the chest with nothing but the small, spindly legs writhing uselessly around it. It came to the rubble pile he was entombed in, seemed to look over it -

Then, as if receiving order from some higher power, it made a humming noise, the tendrils disapperated, and it straightened back out and began to turn away.

It was not a trick. It was really leaving. He watched it disappear behind a highrise, and it was gone.

Something like a human scream rang out - the ground shook -  another massive CRACK!, a flash of light - unearthly squealing - and the angel and _something else_ hurtled into the street and slammed into a building. It was an _Eva_ pounding the angel into a building - the angel was trying to strangle it with one tendril, had it stabbed with the second tendril, the ends of the tendrils were flailing -

The other Eva bit at the tendril at its neck and it stretched like a worm and ripped off - and it whipped its head around as if expecting something else to come, and Armin saw that it had six eyes, all ablaze - and it pulled something from its shoulder and brought it down with both hands into the heart of the angel.

The angel swelled up like a balloon and burst.

Everything from the rubble to the road was coated in a maroon paste of dust and angel blood. Red rain was spilling down from the sky and catching, crimson, in the sunlight.

And amongst it, the other Unit, all green and black and covered in blood. It tilted its head, closed its eyes, and opened bared teeth towards the sky, like a child trying to catch the rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ll probably be using the footer as notes on previous drafts, just to let everyone know my thought process here. You don’t burn three years saying ‘don’t worry guys, it’s happening’ without wanting to show everyone what you’ve been doing, haha.  
> The absolute earliest iteration of EVAOT I ever worked on was an AU that I created jointly with ladytano back in 2013. It involved both of the casts from NGE and AoT clashing and working together to defeat angels in the Eva universe, and all of the lovely intra-character politics that would ensue.  
> Unfortunately, when I started using that AU for nanowrimo I had to take the double cast idea to the chopping block pretty quickly, as I felt I couldn’t give all of them satisfying character arcs in such limited time. That lead to the earliest nanowrimo version of this chapter I can remember; Armin as an NERV-trained “backup pilot” who was touching down directly into Tokyo-2 during an angel attack.  
> That’s changed since then, obviously - I hit the roadblock pretty early on of explaining why my cast was in Japan but made almost entirely of European characters. “Well, it’s an AU” seemed like a pretty piss-poor excuse to me as I didn’t see why a Japanese-based NERV would outsource that heavily. It would feel like Evangelion with different faces pasted over the characters. I didn’t want to do that.  
> I briefly looked into relocating the AU into Germany to match Attack on Titan’s setting, but quickly decided on Rome instead. Home to the holy Vatican City, Rome seemed like the perfect compromise, combining Evangelion’s heavy Judeo-Christian themes and Attack on Titan’s European setting and designs. (Besides which, there’s a canonical treaty in the Rebuild-verse called “the Vatican Treaty” mentioned in 2.22. That seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up.)  
> But anyways, that’s how Armin touching down in Tokyo ended up changing into Armin touching down into Vatican City, to fight all those nasty angels.  
> Give or take a few months of worldbuilding, that changed too, obviously; Vatican City lost its direct role in the story, and the very next iteration had Armin living in Rome in an international boarding school (which, two-birds-one-stone, also justified the presence of the 104th kids in Italy, whereas I didn’t have a reason for them to be there before). In that iteration of the first chapter, Levi himself knocks on Armin’s dorm door to take the officially-minted pilot down to the geofront, and the chapter completes with Armin (anxiously but willingly) getting in the robot and fighting the angel.  
> Eventually, through a lot of mutations, it ended with the version you see here, where Armin and his classmates are woken from a restless sleep in a lockdown shelter during an angel attack, and Armin is outright abducted by complete strangers to replace their lost pilot. This ends up creating a much more bitter and traumatized Armin than the other scenarios, but it also creates a much more _vindictive_ and _proactive_ Armin, which was missing from previous drafts. “Anxious but willing” pretty much described him in all situations in all previous drafts, and while it _worked_ , it definitely lacked some _oomph_.  
>  The one thing that has remained remarkably unchanged about Chapter 1 is the fight itself. Armin always loses, and a berserking Eva always appears to save him. The last line in the chapter is actually the oldest line in the entire thing - I wrote about the Eva, covered in blood as it tilts its head to the rain, in the very first draft I ever wrote in November 2013, and that line has been in every subsequent drafting since. It was like the only bolt of linguistic lightning I’ve ever experienced.


End file.
